George Leonard (Easlen)

George Leonard, @a pioneer in the field of human potential, is author of twelve books, including The Transformation, Education and Ecstasy, The Ultimate Athlete, and Mastery. During his seventeen years as senior editor for Look magzine, he won an unprecedented number of national awards for education writing, and during the 1980s produced annual Ultimate Fitness sections for Esquire as well as numerous articles on a wide variety of subjects in such magazines as Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, New York, Saturday Review, and The Nation. Leonard holds a fifth-degree black belt in aikido, and is co-owner of a martial arts school in Mill Valley, California. He is founder of Leonard Energy Training (LET), a transformative practice inspired by aikido, which he introduced to some 50,000 people in the U.S. and abroad. He is a past-president of the Association of Humanistic Pyschology, and currently serves as president of Esalen Institute.

@A native of Georgia, Leonard received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina and Doctor of Humanities degrees from Lewis and Clark College and John F. Kennedy University. He served with the U.S. Air Force as a combat pilot in the South Pacific during World War II and as an intelligence officer and magazine editor during the Korean war. His adventures along the human frontiers of the 1960s are described in his 1988 memoir, Walking on the Edge of the World. His new book, The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei, was published by Dutton in June 1999."